Phys.org August 4, 2022 Various artificial visual systems including those based on human eyes, insect eyes and fisheyes have been developed. However, attempts to develop systems for both terrestrial and aquatic environments and bioinspired electronic eyes are restricted in their maximum field of view to a hemispherical field of view (around 180°). An international team of researchers (South Korea, USA – UT Austin, MIT) has developed an amphibious artificial vision system with a panoramic visual field inspired by the functional and anatomical structure of the compound eyes of a fiddler crab. They integrated a microlenses array with a graded refractive […]
A simple, cheap material for carbon capture, perhaps from tailpipes
Science Daily August 5, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkely, Stanford University, Texas A&M) has demonstrated new sustainable, solid-state, polyamine-appended, cyanuric acid–stabilized melamine nano porous networks (MNNs) via dynamic combinatorial chemistry (DCC) at the kilogram scale toward effective and high-capacity carbon dioxide capture. Polyamine-appended MNNs reaction mechanisms with carbon dioxide were elucidated with double-level DCC where two-dimensional heteronuclear chemical shift correlation nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was performed to demonstrate the interatomic interactions. They distinguished ammonium carbamate pairs and a mix of ammonium carbamate and carbamic acid during carbon dioxide chemisorption. The coordination of polyamine and cyanuric […]
Unlocking the recipe for designer magnetic particles for next generation computing technologies
Phys.org August 4, 2022 Recently ensembles of chiral spin textures, consisting of skyrmions and magnetic stripes, are shown to possess rich interactions with potential for device applications. However, several fundamental aspects of chiral spin texture phenomenology remain to be elucidated, including their domain wall (DW) structure, thermodynamic stability, and morphological transitions. An international team of researchers (Singapore, USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has shown the evolution of these textural characteristics unveiled on a tunable multilayer platform using a combination of full-field electron and soft X-ray microscopies with numerical simulations. They demonstrated the increasing chiral interactions, the emergence of Néel […]
Water can’t touch this sanded, powdered surface
Phys.org August 4, 2022 Water droplets must have large apparent contact angle (CA) (>150°) and small CA hysteresis (<10°) on hydrophobic surfaces. Previous research usually involved complex fabrication strategies to modify the surface wettability. Researchers at Rice University developed a simple technique that involves sandpaper and a selection of powders which are sanded into the surface. They applied the technique on a variety of surfaces (Teflon, polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and polydimethylsiloxane) with a variety of powder additives. These included laser-induced graphene fiber, turbostratic flash graphene, molybdenum disulfide, Teflon, and boron nitride. A variety of aluminum oxide sandpapers were […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of August 5, 2022
01. Acoustics researchers develop novel underwater carpet cloak 02. Affordable and sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries proposed 03. An AI Just Independently Discovered Alternate Physics 04. Balloon fleet senses earthquakes from stratosphere 05. Cloud study demystifies impact of aerosols 06. A molecule of light and matter 07. Nanoparticles increase light scattering, boost solar cell performance 08. Neural networks and ‘ghost’ electrons accurately reconstruct behavior of quantum systems 09. New optical switch could lead to ultrafast all-optical signal processing 10. Smart chip senses, stores, computes and secures data in one low-power platform And others… A paper battery with water switch Researchers […]
Acoustics researchers develop novel underwater carpet cloak
Phys.org July 28, 2022 Aided by a reflecting surface, the acoustic carpet cloak has become one of the most practically feasible invisibility devices. However, due to the difficulty in the realization of ideal material parameters, the underwater carpet cloaks could only work for a small incident angle. Researchers in China designed an underwater carpet cloak using a three-component metafluid composed of syntactic foam, steel, and water. The syntactic foam, which is synthesized from epoxy resin and hollow glass microspheres, exhibits lower mass density and higher sound velocity relative to water. By periodically embedding the syntactic foam and steel rods in […]
Affordable and sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries proposed
Science Daily August 2, 2022 Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute proposed using calcium ions as an alternative to lithium-ions in batteries because of inexpensive, abundant, safe, and sustainable battery chemistry that uses calcium ions in an aqueous, water-based electrolyte. They demonstrated the battery using orthorhombic and trigonal polymorphs of molybdenum vanadium oxide (MoVO) as a host for calcium ions. As calcium ion is divalent, one ion insertion will deliver two electrons per ion during battery operation allowing for a highly efficient battery with reduced mass and volume of calcium ions. However, the higher ionic charge and the larger size of […]
An AI Just Independently Discovered Alternate Physics
Science Alert July 29, 2022 Despite the prevalence of computing power and artificial intelligence, the process of identifying the hidden state variables themselves has resisted automation. Most data-driven methods for modelling physical phenomena still rely on the assumption that the relevant state variables are already known. A longstanding question is whether it is possible to identify state variables from only high-dimensional observational data. Researchers at Columbia University proposed a principle for determining how many state variables an observed system is likely to have, and what these variables might be. They demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach using video recordings of […]
Balloon fleet senses earthquakes from stratosphere
Phys.org July 28, 2022 Note: This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting… The ground movements induced by seismic waves create acoustic waves propagating upward in the atmosphere, providing a practical solution to perform remote sensing of planetary interiors. However, a terrestrial demonstration of a seismic network based on balloon-carried pressure sensors has not been provided. Researchers in France reported the detection of a large, distant earthquake in a network of balloon-bound pressure sensors in the stratosphere. They demonstrated that quakes properties and planet internal structure can be probed […]
Cloud study demystifies impact of aerosols
Science Daily August 1, 2022 Aerosol–cloud interactions have a potentially large impact on climate. The impacts derived from climate models are poorly constrained by observations because retrieving robust large-scale signals of aerosol–cloud interactions is frequently hampered by the considerable noise associated with meteorological co-variability. An international team of researchers (UK, Switzerland, Germany, USA – NASA) disentangled significant signals from the noise of meteorological co-variability using a satellite-based machine-learning approach. Their analysis showed that aerosols from the 2014 Holuhraun effusive eruption in Iceland increased cloud cover by approximately 10%, and this appears to be the leading cause of climate forcing, rather […]